What’s fair for Fair Park (and Dallas)

Earlier this week, a group of civic leaders, united under the aegis of the Foundation for Community Empowerment, presented the Dallas Morning News with an integrated vision for the city, one that would connect the Trinity to Fair Park, with IH-345 transformed into a curving, tree-lined parkway and a critical stretch of I-30 depressed below grade. Distinctly absent from their plan was the proposed toll road through the Trinity, a project losing influential supporters daily.

Their grand vision, supported by a rather hastily assembled but nonetheless intriguing model by HKS Architects, has quite justifiably grabbed considerableattention. “It’s hard to overstate how important it was,” Rudy Bush noted in a typically apposite commentary. As HKS chairman Ralph Hawkins told the assembled, “If we don’t make this a better people place over the next thirty years, we have a better chance of being Detroit than Portland.”

This discussion, however, has overshadowed the principal reason for the group’s visit to the paper, which was to lobby for a redevelopment plan for Fair Park commissioned by the group, with funding in part from the Hoblitzelle Foundation. This plan has been submitted to Mayor Rawlings’s task force on the future of Fair Park, but the group is quite legitimately concerned it will go unheeded. More than concerned. According to Don Williams, the former chief executive of Trammell Crow, the mayor’s task force is “stacked against any major changes at Fair Park.”

The group’s vision is to transform Fair Park into a catalyst for all of South Dallas, a dynamic site active year round with park space, institutional and commercial tenants, and mixed-income housing. According to the plan’s author, the distinguished urban planner Antonio Di Mambro, the idea is to “think of Fair Park the way Olmsted thought of Central Park”; that is, as a magnet that would draw investment to the entire area surrounding it, while enhancing the city with a precious amenity.

The plan and its backers are absolutely certain of the impediment to this vision: the State Fair of Texas. “The reason that Fair Park has not been able to achieve its full potential, is that the operational requirements of the State Fair as it is run today have placed a chokehold on the city or any agency’s ability to reprogram the site or redevelop it to its highest and best use.” This part of their memorandum was underlined, for emphasis.

The essential problem is that the State Fair controls the leases to many of the buildings on the site for much of the year, well beyond the few weeks it is in session, and otherwise controls an overly large segment of the park, which it has devoted to parking.

Given the option, Di Mambro would like to remove the State Fair entirely from the site, to another Dallas venue. But that not politically being possible, his proposal calls for the division of Fair Park, with the State Fair limited to 138 acres in the northeast corner of the site. The remainder would be left for redevelopment. The plan also calls for a new management structure, with the State Fair removed from decision-making over the entire site.

Mayor Rawlings speaks quite eloquently of his plans to regenerate South Dallas. This excellent plan is an opportunity to do so on a grand scale. That is a very rare opportunity indeed, and one that should not be squandered.

But it should also be understood, as its advocates suggest, within the broader context of the remaking of Dallas. The city needs a coherent, integrated vision for the future, and not more of the ad-hoc-ism that allows entities like the State Fair or TxDOT to guide its decisions according to their own priorities. The status quo, at Fair Park and beyond, is not acceptable.

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News, reviews, nuggets and tidbits from the local arts scene, including literature, theater, classical music, opera, dance and the visual arts.